POWER BALL The Ettes
Nov 18, 2009
The sultrysexycool garage trio is comin' to your town. Gonna help you party down, in fact.
BY ROXANA HADADI
The Ettes do not give a crap about what you think.
Frontwoman Coco Hames, drummer Poni Silver and bassist Jem Cohen don't get
bothered when other bands on the road with them fight amongst themselves, bitch
about how hard their lives are and complain like bickering children. They don't
get riled up about critics who struggle to define their sultry, raw,
half-Ramones, half-girl-groups sound, which they very simply label "beat-punk."
And most importantly - and most viciously - they'll rip you apart if you every
try to control them.
"I don't need somebody to tell me what to do or how to write," Hames, the group's feisty, glamorous and exceptionally strongly opinionated lead singer says. "If we had started when we were really young, on a major label with all this money, I wonder what would have happened. But we started on Sympathy [for the Record Industry], with no money and nobody telling us what to do. Starting there and having a degree of success with that, you can say, ‘I don't really need anybody.'
"It didn't occur to me that someone would tell me what to name my album, or what to wear or say in interviews, but as it turns out, a lot of bands are run that way, probably because it's less stressful for the band just to be told what to do," she adds.
"It'd be cool if we were like that, but we just can't act like that," interjects Cohen, the trio's sole male member and the one who succeeds in playfully pushing all of Hames' buttons.
"Oh yeah, it would be cool to be a puppet," Hames fires back.
"It would be great, if I could stomach that," Cohen smirks, and it sounds like the exchange is one that's happened time and time again in the world of the Ettes: Hames says something bluntly and openly, Cohen lightens it up, the two of them spark at each other and Silver stands back and giggles while it all goes down. (Oh, and round one: Cohen.)
There's a comfort here that can only be born of too many nights clustered together onstage, too many days driving long hours to get to the next show (and picking up furniture at thrift shops along the way), too many recording sessions spent ripping through tracks that sound like if The Ronettes hung out with Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy and got hit on by Johnny Rotten. Or, as Hames likes to describe it, "the ‘Peppermint Twist' mixed with leather and New York City and the late '70s."
And there's a kind of familiarity that comes from an us-against-the-world mentality the group has developed for years - bred after Hames and Silver quit their jobs in film production and fashion design , developed while they toiled with Cohen on albums such as Look at Life Again Soon, the "Danger Is" EP and the current Do You Want Power and slightly mellowed with a bit of mainstream success - like their sold-tour with Kings of Leon earlier this year, the just-completed tour with Juliette Lewis, and a track on the soundtrack of Drew Barrymore's much-hipster-hyped directorial debut, Whip It!
When looking back on how it all started, Hames can't help but feel it's been a long time coming - from when the band moved separately from New York to Los Angeles in 2004, without a thought given to their friends' or families' doubts, and to when they slowly began to realize how much they weren't prepared for.
"We didn't know anybody - our parents aren't famous, we don't have a trust fund, we don't have money, we don't have an in to the music business and we had no clue what to say when people asked about our music, ‘Who do you think is going to listen to that?'" Hames says. "And we're like, ‘Shoot, we didn't think about that.'"
But when the band's reputation eventually reached the ears of Long Gone John, the creator of label Sympathy for the Record Industry, their luck began to turn. Cohen is quick to point out, though, that he's convinced a certain picture of the group - with Hames in a Lolita-esque black velvet babydoll dress, holding a tambourine - had a lot do with John's interest.
"I fucking hate that picture," Hames says. "That dress I'm wearing has no back to it; I found it on eBay, and it like, became this icon. And people to the show and it's like, ‘We don't look like that.' I'm not a babydoll, Poni has lots of hair -
"Every single listing uses that picture," Cohen cuts in.
" - I don't think any of us could look less like that picture," Hames finishes firmly. (Round two: Hames).
And not only could the group look less like that picture, they couldn't fundamentally be less like it, either. While Hames stands in the forefront of the portrait, looking semi-vacantly tart-like as Cohen and Silver stand somewhat uncomfortably in the background, this trio is all about an even playing field. Though they banter back and forth like competitive siblings (Cohen's an often target: Hames calls him "old man" more than once, and Poni boasts of throwing water bottles at him when he's "being an asshole"), they'll defend each other with a kind of fierce protectiveness.
"There were a couple of shows that - if we had the ability to do it - we played in a straight line, and invariably, the focus is on me because I'm singing," Hames says. "I'm not a reluctant frontman - I'm not a shoe-gazing whatever - and I really enjoy performing a lot, but I also really like the people that I'm playing with. My drummer is not one I need to hide, and my bass player isn't one playing root notes.
"I would get bored if I were the only one," Hames continues. "It's a little smorgasbord, and sometimes I feel like - if we play with other three-piece - sometimes I feel like the singer is doing a lot of fucking work to put the attention onto them. It would probably be a little easier if the rest of your band was a little more remarkable. I certainly don't mind sharing the spotlight - I think it's cool to have such a good band."
Combine that kind of professional devotion with actual personal affection (all three Ettes live on the same side of Nashville, hang out together often, "basically never stop drinking," according to Hames, and want to "import all the cool people in the country" into their city, Cohen says) and you've got a group that swears they'll stick together to the end, no matter how erratic their schedule gets. And with their most recent release, Do You Want Power, produced by Reigning Sound mainman Greg Cartwright (who also plays on it) and out now on the Take Root label, and plans for a new tour and record coming soon, that unpredictability is sure to come into play again.
"In the next six months, we'll probably move again, but we have this fantasy that we'll stay in a town," Hames says. "But then comes the next tour and the next move and whatever, and then we're gone again. I don't know where it will be."
And then - with a promise that we'll all hang up the phone at the same time and a countdown to prove it ("one, two, three, go!" Cohen chants) - the Ettes are off, striding away into the great, underground unknown.
Coco Hames also blogs for Blurt. You can read her column "Look At Life" here. She also penned an installment in our way-popular recurring feature "The Most Fucked Up Thing I've Ever Seen," which can be viewed here.
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